Dell touchpad issues with Fedora

I have a Vostro V13. I loaded up Fedora 14 on it, and am having some strange issues with the touchpad. When I scroll left to right, often times the mouse cursor skips and ends up on the far left screen edge over and over. When you lift your finger from the right side of the touchpad to the left (to move the cursor further right) it skips all the way back to the left. This is very repeatable. I've tried turning off scrolling, palm detection etc, and nothing helps.

driver issue? Any suggestions?

 

What kind of touchpad does that machine have? Can you post the output of xinput list?

You mean if you touch the touchpad your cursor jumps to the corresponding place on the screen? If so that sounds like it's maybe stuck in absolute mode when it should be in relative mode (or vice versa).

Otherwise, if you're talking about the situation where you have two fingers on the touchpad and releasing one of them causes the cursor to jump towards the position of the finger that's still held down, that's normal and you can generally enable two-finger scrolling to get rid of that behavior.

 

AYG, I believe the V13 uses the Synaptics touchpad drivers in Windows 7.

 

I have a Vostro 1220 with SL on it, similar to Fedora and no issues. Mine is a Synaptics.

 

it is the synaptics touch pad. Its difficult to explain the behavior...if I swipe my finger left to right, the cursor will take the same path on the screen every time, over and over and over, but it doesn't always do it either. It's pretty frustrating. I do have 2 finger scrolling enabled, but it's not causing it or fixing it, because it does it with it enabled or disabled.

Maybe I'll see if I can take a video of the behavior with my cell phone tomorrow.


xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=13 [slave pointer (2)]

 

See if this helps you any.

Linux Mint Forums • View topic - Synaptics touchpad multi-touch capabilities?

 

it's not really applicable. My touchpad has all the features and it works, it just 'skips' when scrolling left to right. I will work on attempting a video. Maybe the touchpad itself is just faulty, although when I swap the original Windows hdd back in, I can't get it to occur.

 

here is the video. Sorry it's sideways, I shot it in portrait mode so it was easier to film and run the laptop at the same time.

http://www.silverlakesandduners.com/movies/VIDEO0013.3gp

 

Have you tried a newer kernel, like the 2.6.38 one from F15?

 

no, I usually don't enable the alpha/beta repos, but I suppose it's worth a shot.

 

There isn't too much risk if you install just the kernel and headers. It's a stable kernel.

 

Great day for that Avy, 'Groceries.....LOL

 

I think it's actually the touchpad itself. I stuck the original windows hard drive back in it, and used it for about a half hour, and it started acting up again. I'm going to have Dell replace the touchpad in it, and go from there. I appreciate the suggestions fellas.

 

the Dell tech just left, and the problem persists in Linux and Windows. Guess I'll have to see if Dell will replace the machine. blah